PEOPLE vs. PADAN (101 PHIL. 749)

FACTS: In September 1953 accused Jose Fajador as the manager and Ernesto Reyes as ticket collector and or exhibitor hired their co-accused Marina Palan and Cosme Espinosa to act as performers or exhibitionists. In fact, they actually performed sexual intercourse in the presence of many spectators, thereby exhibiting or performing highly immoral and indecent acts.

ISSUE: Whether they violated Art. 201 of the RPC

HELD: The Supreme Court has had occasion to consider offenses like the exhibition of still or moving pictures of women in the nude, which it condemned for obscenity and offensive to morals. In those cases, one might yet claim that there was involved the element of art; that connoisseurs of the same, and painters and sculptors might find inspiration in the showing of pictures in the nude, or the human body exhibited in sheer nakedness as models in tableaux vivants (silent and motionless group of people arranged to represent a scene or incident).

But an actual exhibition of the sexual act, preceded by acts of lasciviousness, can have no redeeming features. In it, there is no room for art. One can see nothing in it but clear and unmitigated obscenity, indecency and an offense to public morals, inspiring and causing as it does, nothing but lust and lewdness, and exerting a corrupting influence especially on the youth of the land. Thus, considering the seriousness of the crime, the relatively severe penalty imposed by the trial court is proper.